Searching for the Amazons Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to: Karl Baipakov, Almaty; Nazand Begikhani, University of Bristol; Zana Cousins-Greenwood, Centre of Horseback Combat, Hemel Hempstead; Nujin Derik, Kurdistan, Syria; Pettra Engeländer, Independent European Horseback Archery School, Hofbieber, Germany; Xavier Jordana, GROB, Barcelona; Isabel Käser, SOAS, London; Lajos Kassai, Kaposmérö, Kaposvár, Hungary; Eileen Murphy, Queen’s University, Belfast; Hermann Parzinger, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Arzu Pesmen, London; Ricarda Schmidt, Exeter University; Sinam Sherkany, Kurdistan, Syria; Aladdin Sinayic, London; Katie Stearns, Flying Duchess Ranch, Seattle, USA; Henry Vines, Transworld, London, and Brenda Updegraff, Hampshire, for superb editing; and all at Felicity Bryan Agency, Oxford.

  PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise stated.

  First section

  Page 1: Battling Amazons © De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images; Amphora © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Images; Parthian shot © CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images; Urfa mosaic © Mick Palarczyk.

  Page 2: Temple of Apollo © Bettmann/Getty Images; Bassae Frieze © Martin Beddall/Alamy Stock Photo.

  Page 3: Achilles battles Penthesilia © De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images; the Greeks battle the Amazons ©

  PHAS/Universai Images Group via Getty Images.

  Page 4: Pazyryk tomb © Alexander Demyanov/Shutterstock.com; Pazyryk excavations © Sisse Brimberg/Getty Images; the royal couple of Arzhan 2 © V. Efimov.

  Page 5: Tattoos on the skin of the Ukok Princess © Sputnik/Science Photo Library; reconstruction © Elena Shumakova, Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; skull with a sword wound © Eileen Murphy.

  Page 6: Comb © AKG Images; stag © Heritage-Images/CM Dixon/ AKG images; saddle decorations © De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images.

  Page 7: stag © AKG Images/De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti; gold earrings © De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/ Bridgeman Images; hunter pursuing a hare © Heritage-Images/CM Dixon/AKG Images; sword and scabbard © Pictures from History/ Bridgeman Images; plaque © AKG Images/De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti.

  Page 8: Gold Man © Franka Bruns/AP/Rex/Shutterstock.

  Second section

  Page 1: 1676 map of California © Historic Map Works LLC and Osher Map Library/Getty Images.

  Page 2: Love feast of the Amazons © Granger/Bridgeman Images. Page 3: Waorani © John Wright; theatrical costume © Florilegius/ SSPL/Getty Images; French educational card © Look and Learn/ Bridgeman Images.

  Page 4/5: Battle of the Amazons by Peter Paul Rubens © PHAS/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

  Page 6: Dahomey lithograph © AKG Images; Russia’s Night Witches © AKG Images/Universal Images Group/Sovfoto; Kurdish soldiers © Vianney Le Caer/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images.

  Page 7: Lajos Kassai © Kassai Horsearchery School; Zana Cousins-Greenwood © Rosie Hallam/Barcroft Media; Pettra Engeländer © Pettra Engeländer/Independent European Horseback Archery School.

  Page 8: Sensation Comics cover © DC Comics/Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archive.

  Illustrations

  An Enduring Legend

  Battling Amazons on a 4th-century BC Greek vase. The rider has reins, but no saddle or stirrups.

  On a 5th-century BC Greek vase, a warrior fights an Amazon.

  An Amazon riding bareback reaches for an arrow to shoot backwards in a ‘Parthian shot’, named after the people recorded in Iran in the 6th century BC, when this Etruscan bronze was made.

  A thousand years later than the Greek images, this 5th-or 6th-century mosaic from Urfa (ancient Edessa), Turkey, shows the Amazon queen Penthes
ilea drawing her bow with a thumb-ring hidden by her hand.

  Greeks v. Amazons Down the Ages

  The 5th-century BC Temple of Apollo at bassae. Before it was enclosed for restoration in 2001

  In the Bassae Frieze, a Greek warrior falls at the feet of an Amazon.

  On two Roman coffins, Greeks battle Amazons. The Greek legends had migrated, and survived over 700 years as fashionable themes to decorate the sarcophagi of the Roman rich. In the first, from the 2nd century AD the Greek hero Achilles drags the Amazon queen Penthesilia from her horse. The second is from the 3rd century.

  Amazonian Women Buried in Tuva and Siberia

  A pazyryk tomb in the Altai Republic, Russia, near the mongolian border.

  Russian and German archaeologists open the giant Scythian burial mound Arzhan 2 in Tuva.

  Working on the remains of a horse-burial in Arzhan 2.

  A portrait of the so-called ‘royal couple’ of Arzhan 2, complete with gold-decorated headdresses, capes, jerkins, daggers and boots. Note the woman’s peaked hat, one version of a feature common to many Central Asian people.

  Tattoos on the skins of the ice Maiden or Ukok Princess of Altai.

  A drawing shoes the position of the tattoos and some of their Animal-style motifs.

  Gold-plated horses found on a woman’s headdress in Arzhan 2.

  In a woman’s skull found in Aymyrlyg, a sword wound shows the violent cause of death.

  Golden Grave Goods for Scythian Royals: a Selection from Ukrainian Kurgans 7th–4th centuries BC

  A comb topped by fighting Scythians.

  A stag in which the antlers have been turned into a design feature running along its spine, while other animals decorate its flanks.

  Saddle decorations in the form of rams’ heads

  A stag with distorted antlers;earrings; and a plaque showing a hunter pursuing a hare.

  A sword and scabbard decorated with a wolf’s head and interwined beats.

  A plaque made with repeated imprints of the stag motif, similar to the one top left. Perhaps it had significance for religious ritals or as an identity marker.

  The Golden Man – or a Golden Woman?

  Though seen so widely in Kazakhstan that this is virtually a symbol of the country, the Golden Man is so slight of build that he may in fact have been a woman. Towering headdresses were worn by aristocratic women across much of Central Asia.

  California: The Mythical Island of New World Amazons

  In the early 16th century, the Spaniards who first explored the west coast of the Americas were entranced by European novels based on the idea that Queen Califia and her Amazon warriors lived in some New World island. They named California after her and guessed that the peninsula of Baja California, now part of Mexico, was her island. The belief lasted for over a century, as this 1676 map shows.

  The Amazon: A Legend, a River, an Image

  Orellana’s Challenge 1:1,200 kilometres inland, the Amazon is still a freshwater sea. Here, its sediment-rich ‘white’ waters from the Andes meet the nutrient-poor Rio Negro Orellana, the first to explore the Amazon, came here in June 1542, noted that the waters were ‘black as ink’ and named the river accordingly.

  Orellana’s Challenges 2 and 3: the people, the environment. It takes expertise to live in the rainforest. In the 1980s, this Waorani man, Tedikawae, was living in the rainforest south of the Napo. He has killed a nocturnal curassow using a blow-gun and darts tipped with curare, a nerve-poison – tools and skills that evolved over centuries.

  Over the years, Amazons became stock figures in theatre. This is a 19th-century stage Amazon in ‘traditional’ costume: loose skirt, cross-gartering, Phrygian cap and bow.

  An Amazon as seen on a late 19th-century educational card included in a box of French chocolates.

  Folklore trumps reality in this 1598 woodcut of ‘Amazons in their mating season’, in a landscape that owes nothing to the rainforest that was their supposed home.

  Women Warriors Yesterday and Today

  An 1890 German lithograph shows Dahomey’s ‘Corps of Amazons’.

  Before take-off in Moscow to fly across Russia in 1938, the three women pilots pose before their long-range bomber, Rodina (Motherland). Marina Raskova, founder of Russia’s all-female air squadrons, is on the right.

  A team of ‘Night Witches’ in front of their Po-2 biplanes.

  Kurdish women fighters in a march-past near Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, July 2014.

  Lajos Kassai, the Hungarian who revived and popularized the sport of horseback archery. He has taught many women across Europe and the US, who find the results empowering and inspiring.

  Zana Cousins-Greenwood, co-founder of the Centre of Horseback Combat, Hemel Hempstead, west of London.

  Pettra Engeländer, who trained with Kassai and now runs her own horseback archery centre about 100 kilometres north-east of Frankfurt, Germany.

  An Amazonian Princess Saves the World

  The first appearance of Wonder Woman inside All Star Comics No. 8 in December 1941 was followed by this cover appearance a month later. Though an Amazonian princess, Diana, she springs up as an all-American heroine to help with the war effort.

  INDEX

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  Abdullah, Asya 272

  Abeokuta, Dahomey enemy 194, 197, 201, 202, 203, 206–7

  Abomey

  museum 192

  taken by French 210–11

  Abzug, Bella 260–1

  Achaemenid empire 71

  Achaeus 11

  Achilles 11

  and Penthesilea 12–16

  Kleist version 183–7

  possibly in Bassae Frieze 21–2

  Acropolis 1, 2

  Action Comics, Superman 252

  Acuña, Cristóbal de, on Amazons 151

  Admete, and Hippolyte’s girdle 4–7

  Aella 7

  Aeschylus, Eumenides/Oresteia 9–10

  Africa, scramble for 196

  Agaja king of Dahomey, women bodyguards 192–3

  Age of Aquarius 247

  Agee, Joel, Penthesilea translation 182n40

  Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, and infinitesimal calculus 179

  Ajax, and Penthesilea 14–15

  Akishev, Kemal, and Saka kurgan 68

  Akkadian records, Scythians 37–8

  Akkerman kurgan 54–5

  al-Anfal campaign 270n61

  Aladdin 264–5, 270

  Alans (Aryans)

  Sarmatians become 101

  as Ossetians 101–2

  in Britain as Roman troops 102

  in north-eastern Turkey 102

  in Spain 103

  Albert and Isabella of Antwerp 163–4, 165

  Alcippe 7

  Aleppo, Kurdish women fighters at 271

  Alexander the Great, and Amazons 38–42

  appearance, Curtius on 40

  All Star Comics xviii

  Wonder Woman 255–60

  All-American Publications 252

  Almaty, Kazakhstan 67

  alphabetical script 10

  Altai Mountains 54

  Scythians, frozen graves 74–7

  Altai Republic, Ukok Plateau Ice Maiden 79–88

  Amaís de Gaula (Montalvo), influence 128–34

  Amazons

  defining trait: distinct groups 213–16

  explorer-invented communities Brazilian river communities 138–49

  and men 141–2

  wealth of gold 142

  California, Montalvo’s fictional island 128–34

  Christine de Pizan on 126–7

  Hurons descended from,

  Lafitau on 152–3, 214

  Greek classical

  appearance, Curtius on 40–1

  as xenophobic product 25

  at Siege of Troy 11–16

  attack on Athens 2

  invade Greece 9–10


  name origins xvii-xviii

  Themiscyra, and Alexander the Great 38–42

  Theseus and 8–10

  why depicted 23–6

  in later art/ literature 159–90

  du Boccage feminist Enlightenment version 173–7

  Colombiade 178

  Les Amazones 173–8

  Kleist version 183–8

  Rubens/Brueghel version 164–5

  Rubens realist version 166–7

  Wonder Woman version 256–7

  myths

  and modern world 123–57

  ‘Amazon’, as cliché/pejorative term 264

  breast myth 40–1, 43–9

  Greeka.com repeats 47

  ignored in art 46

  Kleist version 183, 186

  psychologists repeat 47–8

  women of modern times

  Dahomey ahosi women’s army 191–212

  Kurdish women fighters 263–73

  modern horseback archery 117–21

  Soviet women air fighters WWII 216–40

  Amazon River 132–49, 155–6

  communities 137–49

  and numbers 144–5

  languages 144

  amazon.com 156–7

  and Amazons 123

  amazonomachies (‘Amazon battles’) art theme 16–17, 21

  as machismo prop 23–6

  amber beads, Baltic at Arzhan 2 61

  Pokrovka 98

  American Amazons idea (Marston), press on 251

  American Medical Association endorses birth control 251

  American Scholar 253

  American/America see also United States of America

  Amosova, Serafima, on Kociok’s attack 238–9

  Amu Darya, Sarmatians move from 94

  Andromache, on Penthesilea 12

  Animal-style artefacts 53, 59, 61, 85, 87, 98, 101